Friday, September 15, 2006
V of Vindictive
This might seem like a movie review, but it's really an opinion.
I saw some bits from V for Vendetta on TV recently. I like that movie. In fact, I like pretty much everything from Alan Moore, paranoid old lefty though he may be.
But there was one bit in the film I didn't like. When they walked through the history of how Britain came to dictatorship, the evil, shrivelled, heartless Chancellor Sutler is ominously described as having been a member of "the Conservative Party." The tone in which this was said conveyed the sense of "oh, well, yes then he would be a dictator then, wouldn't he, being a conservative and all."
OK, I admit I'm a Tory - an old-line, moderate, PC Tory, but a Tory nonetheless. But that's not why this pisses me off. What I find most aggravating is that it displays such ignorance of history.
The story depicts the British dictatorship as being of the mass-party type of regime. In other words, the dictatorship started as a popular movement and continues to depend on the support of a party organization to maintain broad-ranging control over the population.
Well, hate to break it to ya kids, but those sorts of regimes have always flown the flag of left-wing ideology (even if they didn't always live up by it).
What about the Nazis, you say? Do you mean the National Socialist German Workers Party?
What about the Italian fascists? Mussolini was originally a member of the Socialist Party and his defining slogan of fascism - "everything inside the state, nothing outside the state" - is hardly something one could imagine coming out of the mouth of George Bush, Margaret Thatcher or Stephen Harper.
Then, of course, there are all the various and sundry out-and-out Communist and Third World nationalist regimes that cut a bloody path across the 20th Century.
This isn't to say there haven't been right-wing dictatorships in modern times, but most of those (e.g. the Pinochet regime in Chile) were not the highly-oppressive mass-party type but rather tended to be military coups whose resulting regimes were relatively short-lived.
The bigger point is that the Left has no business getting an attitude about repression and dictatorship. The fact is that most of the horror and atrocity of the last century was committed by people who at least pretended to be left wing.
The Right to be sure has its own faults, but its evils by comparison are smaller. More numerous perhaps, but smaller.
The long and short is that if a dictatorship really did emerge in modern Britain, it wouldn't come from the Tory party. It would come from the Labour Party. Or maybe the Greens.
posted by The Propagandist @ 9:34 AM,
2 Comments:
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At 9:49 AM,
FiL said...
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Actually, I wonder what a dictatorship that grew out of the Monster Raving Loony Party would look like?
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At 10:48 AM,
The Propagandist said...
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I have toyed from time to time with plans to revive the Canadian Rhino Party, which is a similar sort of parody party. They have a long legacy and have produced some wonderful "policies", but sadly the Chief Electoral Office has a vendetta against them.
Hey, and we've looped back to vendetta again! ;-)
